Monday 10 April 2000

Leslie Charteris: The Brighter Buccaneer (1933)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton
Review number: 474

The Brighter Buccaneer is a collection of fifteen typical Saint short stories. These tales concentrate on Simon Templar as an avenger of those taken in by conmen, with a couple of other subjects for variety. All are entertaining, but some show signs of haste in their construction. (This is hardly surprising, considering the vast amount of material written by Charteris in the early thirties.) Most of the short stories about the Saint are trifles compared to the longer works, begin written mainly to fill up space in The Saint magazine. Still, these are very successful within their limited aims.

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